Re: Need to uninstall many packages, how?

[Andy Koppe <andy dot koppe at gmail dot com>]

On 22 July 2010 05:55, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Brad De Vries wrote:
>>>
>>> After several minutes of downloading, verifying, installing,
>>> configuring, post-installing, etc. I realized that it installed a lot
>>> of X and Gnome related packages. ?Now I want to remove them all
>>> because I don't want them. ?However, when I re-run setup.exe and try
>>> to click the various packages to uninstall, it changes other packages
>>> that I had previously selected to uninstall back to "keep."
>>> The only option I see that's available to me is to completely
>>> uninstall cygwin and then re-install the packages I do want. ?That
>>> does not sound fun and I'm hoping someone has a better idea of how to
>>> remove lots of related packages.
>>>
> We really should fix setup.exe so that it is easier to uninstall stuff.
> It's a real problem.

Could this be done simply by not running the dependency resolver until
the user clicks 'Next' on the package selection screen?

Apparently the latter already happens anyway, because if you set a
package to delete that others still depend on, you get a 'Resolve
Dependencies' screen that lists all the packages being added
automatically and why. It even offers an option not to install those
dependencies (but sensibly recommends against that). Perhaps the
'Warning! Unmet Dependencies Found' message at the top would need to
lose the 'Warning!' so as not to needlessly scare users.

Doing this would also address Brad's original issue of packages having
been selected without him realising.

Andy

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